EIA Oil Production Numbers: click to read more about this visualization and the role of visualization in peak oil arguments

Technical writing operates under a small clutch of primary assumptions, such as:

-

As writers, we instantiate these assumptions in the form of text, images, and sound.

To talk about these processes together, and learn more about them, we can identify tendencies and patterns in the technical writing process. These common, recurring figures are akin to the tropes compiled and studied by philosophers and students of literature.

One of the emergent tropes in the field of technical writing today (infoquake) has to be compression. Graphics (tables, charts) have always compressed information into an immediate image-perception, but today...